I research, write about innovation, privacy and reputation via my books and articles, and work on it with clients as president of Arcadia, a communications research, design & delivery lab focused on today's most important, cutting-edge issues. I have 30+ years of professional experience working at big ad/PR agencies and at major brands, and I'm a Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Social Media Are Junk Food For Our Brains. Why Are The Nutritionists Silent?

Requires no prep time. Easy to consume. Fast. Immediately satisfying, yet leaves you wanting more. I could be describing a bag of potato chips or Twitter. Both “feeds” have much in common, and neither experience is necessarily good for you.

A recent Pew report that adult users are taking breaks from Facebook got me thinking of the junk food analogy. Are people really going on social media diets?

Its common to wax poetic about the infinite benefits of using social media, and I get the real, society-changing potential of P2P tech. Only now I’ve got this junk food idea in my head, and I can’t help but wonder whether our celebration of social isn’t tantamount to praising the merits of triple-decker chocolate cake.

There’s an underlying story about nutrition to be told, only none of the experts are telling it.

The social effects of social media are mixed, at best. Trust in institutions is at all-time lows. Political discourse is harder, as is any consensus action, because the collaborative promise of an online global village has morphed into an endless number of walled and locked enclaves of exclusionary ideologies. Customers expect more, get less, and are therefore forced to complain in order to get satisfaction. Loyalty to brands is lower than ever before. The vast majority of social media users are really spectators who aren’t collaborating as much as consuming, and doing so with declining conviction and civility.

It’s interesting that many of the digerati who promote these behaviors are social only with one another, as if they’re well-toned celebrity chefs who are talking to themselves in their kitchens while avoiding the fattening meals they prepare for their customers.

Again, I get the good stuff. I use social tools to connect with family and friends every day. But a steady diet of it may be no different for my mind than a daily bag of chips and a Big Gulp for my gut.

What if communicating faster, shorter, and more often isn’t inherently good, and shouldn’t automatically require us to rewrite the rules of society to emulate it? Just because an individual or corporation can post or tweet doesn’t mean they should, does it? Does every new tech invention — Twitter’s Vine, for instance — demand our unquestioning embrace?

I just published a short book about the challenges and trade-offs of communicating in brief symbols vs. textual arguments, entitled A Thousand Words. It turns out we’re biologically predisposed to like visual stimuli; we don’t have to learn a language to decode it, and its effects are visceral and immediate. Short bursts of words require little of us beyond similarly quick reactions.

It’s not necessarily better, however.

Much of history has been written when we’ve overcome these natural proclivities, and chosen instead to use words and reasoned textual arguments. It’s how we’ve learned to understand and collaborate with one another in every aspect of our lives, from reaching political consensus to the ways brands established relationships with customers. Historically, relying on brief communication, no matter how enjoyably it’s experienced, has been a tool for social control, not empowerment.

The social media genie escaped its bottle long ago, and I truly believe that the idea of peer-to-peer connectivity has immense promise for our lives.

But much of today’s social media experiences amount to little more than tasty bags of mental potato chips. There’s a powerful and mostly-unquestioned lobby that tells us to have another one, and then another one, so institutions and brands happily up their chip production and then wonder why consumers aren’t happy with what they get.

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Michael, thank you so much for reading it! I hope to start a conversation about it (I created this video yesterday to give folks a taster about the ideas), so if you’re inspired to comment about it on Amazon or anywhere else, I’d be honored. Thanks again.

Just watched your video, Jonathan! Sorry didn’t read a book yet… I could bet you made such provocative statement on purpose – to start a discussion:) I believe that we can and need to live with both (visuals and words), it makes our life more vivid. At least pictures helps me to understand an overall concept. But agree with you, pictures can be vague and useless, so we need to practice this skill as well)

Thank you! I’m most definitely being provocative on purpose, though I fully believe in my point. Visuals add flavor and emotion to our experience but they’re not a substitute for verbal or textual communication. My read of history is that visual communication has been used to suppress and control people instead of empower them (words did that instead). I hope you’ll give my book a look and tell me what you think!

Thank you , Jonathan, sounds very interesting! I don’t want to argue, just one more thought – what we are doing usually with words is creating with their help same images (just mental one) or emotions… ) Images can be empowering… otherwise how all visualisation tools is then working?

No argument at all…I really enjoy talking about this stuff, so thank you!

You’re right about the utility of visuals to help present data, but I’m not sure we actually store mental images, per se, as much as cues to construct visuals. Our thoughts and emotions are defined and expressed by words. I don’t mean to denigrate the impact of visual information but simply explore how relying on it can leave us bereft of detail and common cause.